Open Data Outcomes vs Terminal Subscriptions

A Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000 per year. FactSet runs $12,000-20,000. Refinitiv Eikon, S&P Capital IQ, LSEG Workspace—all in the same range.

These tools are excellent at what they do: surfacing data, generating charts, enabling discovery. For many use cases, they're indispensable.

But they share a common limitation: they show you charts. They don't explain your numbers later.

The Terminal Value Proposition

Terminals provide three core capabilities:

1. Data Access Aggregated feeds from exchanges, filings, third-party providers. Real-time quotes, historical prices, fundamental data, reference data.

2. Visualization Charting, screening, comparison tools. The ability to see data spatially and explore relationships.

3. Workflow Integration Excel plugins, API access, chat functions, news integration. Terminals become the operating system for financial work.

This is valuable. For price discovery, market monitoring, and exploratory analysis, terminals are hard to beat.

But here's what they don't do: generate audit-ready artifacts that prove how you reached a conclusion.

What Terminals Don't Provide

No Source Attribution

When you pull a number from a terminal, where did it come from? The terminal aggregates from multiple sources—exchanges, filings, third-party providers, derived calculations. The provenance is opaque.

For exploration, this doesn't matter. For audit, it's a problem.

No Temporal Precision

Terminals show you current data. Historical data exists, but the question "What did the terminal show me on March 15 at 2:00 PM?" is often unanswerable. Data updates, corrections are applied, sources are refreshed.

If your decision was based on data that has since changed, reconstructing the original context is difficult.

No Methodology Documentation

A terminal might show you a company's "debt/equity ratio." How is it calculated? What counts as debt? What exchange rate is used for foreign subsidiaries? The methodology is buried in documentation (if it exists) and may change without notice.

No Reproducibility

Could someone else, using the same terminal, reproduce your analysis? Perhaps—if they use the same screens, same settings, same time window. But none of that is captured automatically.

The Open Data Alternative

Open data—SEC filings, Federal Reserve feeds, exchange data, government statistics—offers a different value proposition:

Verifiable sources: Every data point traces to a public, timestamped document.

Permanent availability: SEC filings don't disappear. Federal Reserve data doesn't get silently corrected.

Transparent methodology: When you derive a metric from public filings, you control (and document) the calculation.

Reproducibility: Anyone can verify your work by accessing the same sources.

The tradeoff: raw open data requires significant processing to become useful. Filings need parsing. Data needs normalization. Calculations need implementation.

The Case for Outcomes

What if you could get the usability of a terminal with the auditability of open data?

This is the thesis behind outcomes: named, guaranteed deliverables that arrive on a schedule with evidence attached.

An outcome is not a data feed. It's an answer with proof.

Terminal	Outcome
"Here's a chart of SOFR rates"	"SOFR was 5.31% as of 2026-01-15 per Federal Reserve H.15 release, retrieved at 09:00:00Z, methodology documented"
"This company's debt is $500M"	"Total debt is $500M per 10-K filed 2025-02-28 (accession 0001234567-25-000456), line item 'Long-term debt' plus 'Current portion', spreadsheet attached"
"Collateral performance is improving"	"DSCR increased from 1.2x to 1.4x between Q3 and Q4 per servicer reports dated 2025-10-15 and 2026-01-15, calculation methodology v2.1, full Evidence Pack attached"

The outcome isn't just data—it's data plus provenance plus methodology plus timestamp plus reproducibility.

When Terminals Win

Terminals are still the right choice for:

Real-time market monitoring: If you need live quotes and tick data, terminals are purpose-built.

Broad exploration: When you don't know what you're looking for, terminal search and screening capabilities are powerful.

Workflow integration: If your entire team lives in Bloomberg, the network effects are significant.

Proprietary data: Some terminal data (estimates, ratings, certain reference data) isn't available elsewhere.

When Outcomes Win

Outcomes are the right choice for:

Audit-sensitive decisions: When you'll need to defend your decision later, outcomes provide the evidence.

Regulatory reporting: When regulators want to see your data sources, outcomes offer transparent provenance.

Systematic processes: When decisions follow rules (thresholds, triggers, schedules), outcomes can operationalize them.

Cost-sensitive use cases: When $24,000/seat/year is hard to justify for specific, narrow data needs.

Open data coverage: When the data you need is public (SEC filings, Fed data, government statistics), paying for a terminal to view it is pure rent.

A Practical Example

Consider tracking credit spreads for a portfolio of CMBS deals.

Terminal approach:

• Analyst opens Bloomberg
• Searches for deal, pulls up spread chart
• Exports to Excel for analysis
• Presents findings in team meeting
• Six months later: "Where did that spread data come from?" "Bloomberg, I think."

Outcome approach:

• Outcome delivers weekly: current spread, prior spread, change, percentile rank
• Each delivery includes: source (pricing service feed), methodology (spread to swap curve, interpolated), timestamp (as-of Friday close, delivered Saturday 08:00)
• Evidence Pack archived automatically
• Six months later: "Where did that spread data come from?" [opens Evidence Pack]

The terminal approach is faster for one-off exploration. The outcome approach is faster for repeated, auditable operations.

The Hybrid Model

For most teams, the answer isn't terminals OR outcomes—it's both.

Terminals for:

• Exploratory analysis
• Real-time monitoring
• Proprietary data access
• Workflow integration

Outcomes for:

• Auditable operational decisions
• Regulatory-sensitive processes
• Systematic, repeatable analyses
• Cost-effective open data access

The question is which use cases belong in which bucket.

Calculating the ROI

A back-of-envelope calculation:

Terminal costs:

• 5 analysts × $20,000/year = $100,000
• Actual usage for auditable decisions: ~20% of terminal time
• Implied cost for auditable use cases: $20,000/year

Outcome costs:

• Depends on volume and complexity
• But: no seat licenses, no per-user costs
• Pay for outcomes delivered, not access provided

For teams where even 2-3 analysts are spending significant time on auditable decisions, the economics often favor a hybrid model.

Conclusion

Terminals and outcomes serve different needs. Terminals are for exploration and real-time awareness. Outcomes are for auditable, defensible, operational decisions.

The question isn't whether terminals are worth $24,000/year—for many use cases, they clearly are. The question is whether you're paying terminal prices for use cases that would be better served by outcomes.

Terminals show charts. Outcomes explain your numbers.

---

CMD+RVL Signals lets you create live, chart-ready views from open data—without the terminal subscription. Try the demo →